Scream 2

Comment:
Scream was a sort of parody of the horror movies, so I expected Scream 2 to be a spoof of the sequels. In fact, at the beginning it seems to be exactly like that, including a funny discussion about which sequels have been better than the original (eg. The Godfather Part II, Aliens and Terminator 2) but soon the movie itself seems to remain victim of the "sequels suck" plague.

The story closely follows the original Scream, if you don't remember what happened there or if you forget the characters then you will have some difficulty at first and you won't fully enjoy many parts. In fact, Scream 2 starts with the projection of the movie "Stab", based on the events shown in Scream which have been turned into a movie thanks to the journalist Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox). Obviously, a new series of murders begins almost immediately and all the character who survived to Scream are back to help Sidney (Neve Campbell) to escape from the new masked killer.

The idea of showing "Stab" as a movie-in-the-movie seems to be very good, it's a pity that it hasn't been used much. I particularly liked the fact that Sidney was played by Tori Spelling because in Scream she said something like "if they'll make a movie about this I'd like to be played by Meg Ryan but with my luck they'd get Tori Spelling"!

The various references to other movies that made Scream so enjoyable are still present in this sequel but they seem to be concentrated in few scenes of the first half, then they almost completely disappear as soon as the 'movie-expert', Randy, is stabbed... References to other actors are also still present albeit in a limited fashion, I particularly enjoyed mentions to David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston (co-stars with Courteney Cox in the Friends series).

This movie is more a thriller than a horror and it is not very frightening, much less frightening than the first Scream. Apparently, no efforts have been put into making it more scary, the writer and the director seemed to be more interested in criticising the media, building an unlikely parallelism with the Greek tragedy and disseminating the plot with fake clues about the identity of the killer. There is also the usual amount of blood (but not too much), murders (quite a lot!), phone calls, chases and fights.

In my opinion, Scream 2 shows a lot of good ideas but unfortunately they are not taken forward enough and the last part of the movie looks exactly like one of the usual horrors and thrillers that it was supposed to spoof, not to imitate! The finale is particularly bad, I know it was exaggerated on purpose but I prefer a more subtle satire and parody. It's useless to say the it is next to impossible to guess who the killer is and even his/her reasons (that he/she explains at the end) seem a bit pathetic...